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[The Velvet Lantern series:The Velvet Lantern | Ceremony | Tricolour - The Passion of Joan of Arc | Manuscript - In Slower Motion | Before the Fall | An essay on Michelangelo Antonioni's 'Blow Up' | Blow Up Cardiff | Sunlight and Dirt | Winter Scatters Berries on Brittle Snow | Black Narcissus]
[Fork I: Barricade | Fork II: The Tower of Destruction | Fork III: Vanishing Point | Aside: Eight Voices in Darkness]
This piece is unusual in my work insofar as it is driven by the material given to me to which I made little modification. The core materials were audio interviews with eight people with varying types and degrees of sight loss. They spoke about the impact their sight loss had on their mental wellbeing.
My day job is in the world of sight loss, so I have three decades of learning about the challenges and accomplishments of blind and partially sighted people yet, despite this, I am always learning something new. I felt privileged to make this work - the eight narrators really gave frank accounts of their experiences. This authenticity forced me out of my usual approaches to manipulation of materials towards allowing the voices to speak directly and without modification. I allowed myself a small concession to formalism by creating a set of eight personae as figures on a stage.
The reason I situate it as an 'aside' within the Velvet Lantern project is because the nature of its presentation was so effective as to inform subsequent work.
I worked with a wonderfully suppotive team of people headed by Dr Claire Nollett at Cardiff University. They have produced a resource page at https://www.cvsr.co.uk/eight-voices-in-darkness/
Produced with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Cardiff University, and Being Human Festival.